What is a Demand-Side Platform?
A demand-side platform (DSP) is a piece of software that allows an advertiser to buy advertising with the help of automation.
First, it allows the advertiser to upload a creative, as well as setup targeting, and put down a budget for their campaign through a dashboard.Once the campaign creative is uploaded, the DSP scours through its network of publishers for sites and mobile apps that fit the advertiser’s criteria and makes a bid for placement. After, it resolves the bid, places the ad, and manages payment – all in a matter of milliseconds.
Why Are Demand-Side Platforms Important?
DSPs matter because they allow mobile advertisers to buy high quality traffic at scale with minimal friction. Rather than manually contacting hundreds of publishers with offers to advertise, DSPs help advertisers to quickly set up campaigns and manage them. This allows user acquisition experts to spend more time working in other valuable areas, such as user base segmentation, to improve performance in the long term.
Another reason why DSPs are proving particularly useful to mobile advertisers is that campaign performance can be managed in real time. Instead of having to wait for a campaign to end, mobile advertisers can adjust campaigns from DSPs easily without causing disruption. This means that advertisers can invest money into a DSP more quickly if a campaign is performing well, or they can easily pull it if it’s performing badly with little problem. Furthermore, the automated element of DSPs means that advertisers can easily scale their efforts on mobile. Previously, advertisers’ efforts to expand could be held back by physical constraints like geographical location. DSPs allow advertisers to overcome this by allowing advertisers to buy traffic with new publishers easily and in new locales.
This helps mobile advertisers to take advantage of the globalized nature of the mobile app economy.
Reference: “Adjust,” Retrieved – 23 April 2018